perfect relaxation

"Some people are so constituted that they can sleep well all their lives, or during the best part of their lives, or at least a tolerably good part of their lives, I thought, while some others, those like me, can't sleep, they never sleep, they are condemned never to be able to sleep, for even when they are sleeping they are never really relaxed by nature and what they do can't be called sleeping, these people never sleep as long as they live because all thier lives, no matter how long they live, they have never had the advantage of a perfect relaxation of their head and body."

~~ from Correction by Thomas Bernhard

Interview with Chris Kelso

I spent last night's insomnia by answering some great questions from UK indie writer Chris Kelso.

the age of environmental anxiety

Still smarting from my failed speculation in the Munro market, I chanced upon more people effecting change in society. Like the aforementioned fellow living without cash, there is the young couple who built and now live in a glass house in a field far from the grid and a friendly father of four leading a movement to reduce carbon emissions through "transition towns." Indeed, the insomnia, and all the wasted hours sitting around not writing novels or grading papers while breathing in the cancer, wouldn't be the same without these articles about happy folks changing their world or mine.

April 18 (drizzling Kunderas)

It's drizzling outside, a fitting complement to this evening's early a.m. insomnia. Earlier in the evening (in the yesterday part of tonight), I scribbled a few pages of the rough stuff and called it "My Life as Kundera" although I may ultimately use "Think and Grow Kundera" as the title, taken from my earlier tweet in support of the idle twoughts of Alexander Chee. Anyway, the topic was my meandering musing on the Kudera-Kundera likeness, my father's interest in Milan's writing, me not being him, etc. It could become a section of The Book of Jay (see bottom links for rough-draft excerpts), but of course, I'll have to improve it a lot before it becomes anything at all.

It passed the time, though.

Speaking of J. Robert's engagement with the K., here's a photograph of some of my father's Kunderas, the paperback copies he discovered in bookstores decades ago:

The photograph is from earlier today, or I should say yesterday, but this copy of The Joke as a Penguin edition (1970) was his purchase decades ago and is the one I read when I finally read a Kundera novel in 2004. It's the third English translation of the book, but not the "definitive" one that includes Kundera's criticism of the previous translations of the book. That would be the Harper Perennial edition originally published in 1992. In the "Author's Note" at the end of the HP ed., Kundera's main expressed criticism of the Penguin edition concerns the editor's efforts at sabotaging the writer's punctuation.

Milan I feel your pain and I must confess that I have had similar feelings that I've never expressed formally in any Author's Note not yet and I've also tried to come to terms with allowing for such differences over commas and periods and even the possibility that the author does not and cannot know what is best in every way for his completed book while also recognizing that it is not only the apostrophe and the semicolon that must all be part of the joke

or no?

insomnia

Insomnia, you never cease to amaze me in how you come at the most predictable times in my life.

Could you at least wake me up at an original time or day of the week? I've been watching you, and I don't like what I see. Not one bit. And so I've no other recourse than to grade you down for this assignment, and you should expect demerits in the future if you continue to act in such a mediocre manner.

Insomnia, you can do better than this. Don't you think?

i came, i read. . .

The Spill the Beans reading was fun, and I had a chance to compete with loud line chatter and cash-register chiming, so that should help prepare me for all future obstacles. Which at the moment seem too overwhelming to consider. . .

Life is good, but insomnia isn't?

Insomnia, in fact, is not always so bad although it's better for those days when there's no teaching the next a.m. I can report that I finished grading a stack of essays earlier in the day and even did some light editing of Cartoon Bubbles after the reading. And a sliver of memoir excerpt will run at Atticus Books on March 19.

And so it goes.